Bitter Fruit

In 1982 two influential books dispelled any lingering doubts about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) involvement in the coup that deposed Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Richard Immerman’s The CIA in Guatemala provided the scholarly analysis of the agency’s operations. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, gave professors a less analytical but more engaging narrative that appealed to students. Both books, based on the first declassified documents of the government’s operations, criticized the United States for launching a covert operation against a popular and democratic government.In the past 18 years, researchers have gathered and analyzed new evidence, refining the interpretations of the Guatemalan revolution. Piero Gleijeses uncovered Guatemalan documents and interviewed prominent actors, most notably María de Arbenz, the widow of the deposed president. His book, Shattered Hope: The United States and the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944–1954, focused on the internal dynamics of the revolution, providing the intellectual counterpart to Immerman’s analysis of the Washington foreign policy apparatus. Gleijeses, an admirer of Arbenz, produced irrefutable evidence of Arbenz’s gravitation toward the Communist Party and ideology, shattering previous portrayals of Arbenz as an economic nationalist or reformer. He also reassigned a portion of responsibility to the Guatemalan military, which ultimately betrayed Arbenz and allowed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to march unopposed into Guatemala City. Jim Handy mined the archives of Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform Institute to produce a sophisticated analysis of Arbenz’s agrarian reform. Revolution in the Countryside demonstrates how Arbenz’s agrarian reform triggered conflicts far beyond the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and the United States government. The agrarian reform generated conflict within and between indigenous communities, alienated Guatemala’s landowners, and disturbed the Guatemalan military because it disrupted the order that had long prevailed in the countryside.Bitter Fruit remains a beautifully written, fast-paced narrative with colorful personality profiles and dramatic scenes. For that reason, it will remain on many college syllabi. However, professors will now have to use it with caution because many of the original interpretations of people and events have changed substantially since its first publication in 1982. Bitter Fruit, though billed as an “expanded edition” of the original, is not revised or updated to take into account the new evidence and interpretations. The authors only changed the title from “The Untold Story” to “The Story of an American Coup in Guatemala.” Stephen Kinzer wrote an afterword, but the body of the narrative remains the same. Given that Schlesinger and Kinzer focus on CIA operations in Guatemala, one would think that they would have consulted Nick Cullather’s Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. Cullather’s history, published originally and exclusively within the CIA, was released along with over 1,200 documents to the National Archives in 1997. Schlesinger and Kinzer concluded, however, that the declassified documents revealed nothing that would compel them to alter their narrative. According to historian John H. Coatsworth, who wrote the introduction to this expanded edition, “this new information tends to confirm rather than alter Bitter Fruit’s account of events” (p. xi).While some of Bitter Fruit’s general conclusions may remain intact, recent research calls into question Schlesinger and Kinzer’s characterization of important events and people. They maintain their original position on Arbenz’s ideology, arguing that Arbenz’s primary ideology was nationalism and that accusations that Arbenz was a communist “dupe” were “farfetched”(pp. 60– 61). Their characterizations of Arbenz’s ideology and his program lose credibility in the wake of Piero Gleijeses. Based on interviews with Arbenz’s widow, José Manuel Fortuny and other Communist leaders, Gleijeses concluded that although Arbenz did not join the Guatemalan Communist Party until 1957, he considered himself a communist during the last two years of his administration.Arbenz apologists have long felt compelled to deny Arbenz’s communist inclinations to maintain the case against the CIA. Yet Gleijeses, an open admirer of Arbenz and his program, explains how and why Arbenz believed that the triumph of communism in Guatemala and around the world was both inevitable and desirable. To reach that stage, Arbenz and other Latin American communists believed that Guatemala had to pass through a capitalist stage in its inevitable evolution toward socialism. Hence, the agrarian reform was indeed designed to make Guatemala into a modern capitalist state, as Schlesinger and Kinzer argue, but that did not make Arbenz a capitalist. Arbenz’s long-term objective, as his opponents in UFCO and the CIA alleged, was the creation of a communist state.Schlesinger and Kinzer maintain some positions that are no longer tenable. They argue, for example, that the Czech weaponry carried on board the Alf hem and confiscated by the Guatemalan Army in May 1954 was “intended solely for the Guatemalan Army”(p. 153). However, Arbenz’s closest political associates have confirmed that a portion of the Alfhem weapons were to be used to arm workers’ militias. Schlesinger and Kinzer insist that the Americans trumped up the charges about the workers’ militias in order to prove their case about a communist conspiracy. But the Americans did not lie in this case; at least a portion of the arms were intended for the workers.None of this justifies the American intervention, but assessing responsibility for the collapse of the Arbenz regime hangs in the balance. In the Bitter Fruit account, the CIA orchestrated the counterrevolutionary movement on behalf of “The Overlord,” or the United Fruit Company. After an inept and bumbling covert campaign, spearheaded by a poorly-trained army of only 150 men, Arbenz simply resigned. According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, Arbenz did not fight because “he was never more than he seemed to be—a bourgeois reformer whose ideology did not extend beyond basic precepts of nationalism and the stimulation of domestic industry and agriculture” (p. 198). It is now clear that Arbenz was a communist who did not fight because he did not have an army or workers’ militias to lead into battle. He failed in his gamble to arm the workers’ militias, and the army, even knowing that it would win, refused to fight because the officers did not want a direct military confrontation with the United States.The academic community should be grateful for the republication of Bitter Fruit by Harvard University Press, for it clearly sets a high literary standard to which other historians should aspire. It is disappointing that Schlesinger and Kinzer did not engage the new evidence and revise their narrative accordingly. None of the new works by Gleijeses, Handy, or Cullather are cited in the text or notes. As a result, the depiction of some events and people in Bitter Fruit is either inaccurate or misleading.The academic community should also be grateful to Nick Cullather, an associate professor of history at Indiana University, for reviewing the CIA’s declassified documents and producing a carefully constructed history of the CIA’s operations in Guatemala. After graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1992, Cullather joined the history staff of the CIA. The CIA had just launched an “openness” initiative, promising to lift “the veil of secrecy which keeps intelligence and espionage in the shadows of history”(p. viii). Cullather and seven other historians, hired to write internal histories of major covert actions, formed the center of the openness campaign. When offered complete access to the agency’s files, Cullather asked for an assignment to the Guatemalan operation. According to Cullather, the history was never intended to be a “full account” or an “official version” of the campaign. “It was meant to stand alone only as a training manual, a cautionary tale for future covert operators” (p. xiv).Cullather received “Top Secret” clearance and had access to all of the records he needed. Over 260 boxes of material had already been found in Job 79-01025A, over 180,000 pages. Ironically, the collection of documents had been assembled as a result of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Schlesinger and Kinzer by the American Civil Liberties Union. Confronted with a nearly unmanageable cache of documents, Cullather chose to limit the scope of his research by eliminating research on the cost of the operation as well as the radio propaganda effort known as SHERWOOD. The cost could not be ascertained with certainty, and David Atlee Phillips had already written about the propaganda campaign in his book.Cullather completed research and writing within a year of his hiring. The brief account he wrote was eventually released to the National Archives, with a small portion of declassified CIA documents on the Guatemalan affair. Cullather had hoped for the release of a “significant portion” of the CIA papers, but the agency, having lost interest in its “openness” campaign, released only one percent of the total collection. Even Cullather’s account was excised and censored by the agency. These excisions, reproduced in this Stanford University edition, reveal the agency’s obsession with secrecy and leave readers still begging for the complete story. In any case, Cullather’s Secret History is the only account based on the complete collection of CIA documents, over 180,000 pages. Schlesinger and Kinzer, in contrast, reviewed only 1,000 pages of documents released by the State Department, Defense Department, and the FBI.Fortunately, Cullather did not produce an “official history” to whitewash the agency’s covert operations. His research exposed the many weaknesses in the agency’s campaign, including “chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation’s first stages, the Agency’s poor understanding of the intentions of the Army, the PGT (Guatemalan Workers’ Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of Castillo Armas’s troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat” (p. 109). Moreover, “while PBSUCCESS succeeded in removing a government, it failed to install an adequate substitute” (p. 113).Cullather also concluded that the United Fruit Company played a minor role in the decision-making process. He argues that the CIA recognized Guatemala as a serious threat even before Arbenz expropriated the company’s property. According to Cullather, “the threat to American business was a minor part of the larger danger to the United States’ overall security” (p. 37). In Cullather’s account, United Fruit is not the “overlord” of the operation but a tool used by the CIA to remove a perceived security threat. Once the company’s usefulness expired, the Eisenhower administration proceeded with its suspended antitrust action, which ended in 1958 with a consent decree that forced the company to divest of its Guatemalan holdings (p. 118).Cullather’s account is in line with recent research on the Guatemalan revolution. It is significant that Piero Gleijese wrote the afterword to Secret History, giving the account his approval by praising Cullather’s intellect and integrity. Cullather’s research in the CIA files confirms that the UFCO played a minor role in the Guatemalan tragedy. He prefaces his account with a quote culled from Gleijeses’ interview with José Manuel Fortuny, who concluded: “They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas” (p. 7). For those who want to believe that the CIA overthrew Arbenz simply to protect a banana company, Bitter Fruit is required reading, and a great read at that. For those who want a full account of the complex array of factors involved in the Guatemalan affair, Cullather’s Secret History has now been added to the required reading list

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